Category Archives: Suzanne Kraft

Seaside saudade

Fast, fast, run before the summer ends and we can’t post any more neo-balearic (or para-balearic) music!

Today we continue in the same mood as last Monday: languorous, lazy and happy, with a sun-kissed soul and a kirlian aura of perfect honey, perhaps with a drop of magenta sadness that some family and friends can’t be here with us, and that some of them, we will never see again.

A state of stasis is suitable to contemplate their and our mortality, the ultimate transition. In a moment like this, basking under the nuclear conflagration of the sun, we embrace the invasion of melancholy and temper it with a consoling thought, like the protagonist at the end of the Third Policeman: our discrete identities and bodies are a fiction that hides constant exchange and death, renewal too. Under this fierce sun, in this melting heat, we surrender to our inner hippie.

So let us begin with Diego Herrera, better known as Suzanne Kraft, who produced last year’s wonderful Talk from Home.

The vibe is similar to Gaussian Curve’s Clouds (which we posted last week): clop-clopping beats, humanistic synthesisers and butterfly guitars like Ry Cooder after dining the best fish ever, in a terrace above the Mediterranean sunset. The result is one of easy nonchalance, a machine that makes immersive dioramas through which you can flash back to the most placid, jewel-like glittering moment of your best (physical, psychic) holiday.

Hiroshi Yoshimura is one of the 1980s Japanese artists we discovered during our algorithmic ambient exploration a few weeks ago. We have struggled to find out much about him personally: he was an environmental musician and a visual poet, he taught industrial and sound design, he sadly died of cancer in 2003.

He also made stunning ambient music where every instant is like the step of a turing machine computing programs of beauty and truth.

Tokyo Bay Area is one of the most amazing things we have heard this year: a piano melody that drones in Badalamenti-esque wonder, if you translated (bizarre-Japanese advert style) Twin Peaks to a 1980s Tokyo marina, this would be the tune enveloping each of Agent Cooper’s moves.

The Sea in My Palm closes Pier and Loft, as well as today’s post, in an uncharacteristic (for Yoshimura) upbeat mode, like a Trans-European express for container ship lanes in Porco Rosso’s pastel sea, it sails past us with muffled electroid beats and wistful, aquatic melodies, its destination some amazing space between Drexciya and Sven Libaek that we didn’t know existed.